Mozart, our older dog, died on Thursday, April
26, due to complications from an operation to remove a liver
tumor. He was twelve years old. Laura and I were with him
at the end, scratching his head and back.

Mozart certainly didn’t act his age; I thought of him as a seventy
pound puppy. His noble profile and the distinguished tufts of
white on his chest, nose, and paws belied the sweet, spastic goof who
learned to bark at a higher pitch to avoid setting off his bark
collar. He was our clever dog, the one who figured out how to
extract his allergy pills from the marshmallows in which we hid them,
eating
around them and leaving the half-crunched bits of little pink pills on
the floor without a scrap of white fluff gone to waste. He was
always excited to see us, whether we’d been gone for an hour or a week,
and no separation was too short to celebrate with a ten-minute tear
around the house. When I would come home from work
he’d be waiting at the top of the stairs with his brother, and he’d
come racing down to hop all over me. When Laura and I came home
together, he’d be pawing at the child gate, putting up a joyous,
boisterous racket. He would bounce up and down on his hind legs
like a bucking bronco and throw his front paws all over; then he’d let
you catch them and dance with him a little.

For the last six years of his life, Mozart was inseparable from his
adopted bother Sage. We would take the two of them to the dog
park on the weekends; they’d wander around a bit to check out the other
dogs, but they’d always stay close to each other and they’d always
wander back to Laura and me before too long. They both had
brindled coats, and people always asked if they were from the same
litter. Nope – different breeds, born six years apart in
different states, but you’d never know it from the way they stuck
together. They got along great and were each other’s
yin and yang, Mozart’s gleeful extroversion balancing Sage’s shy
sweetness. The two of them would engage in brotherly tussles of
epic proportions, all snarling and flashing teeth, only to drop the
posturing in an instant at the first yipe of real pain from either of
them.

Mozart’s voracious appetite was legendary; he loved to eat. It was not
unusual for him to wolf down his breakfast, lick the bowl clean, and
then move in on Sage’s bowl before his more finicky brother had even
started to think about
eating. A few months ago he got into the trash for some chicken
scraps that happened to be mixed in with a decade’s worth of shredded
bills and records, leaving the kitchen and living room covered in a
blizzard of tiny scraps of paper. Just the Saturday before the
operation, he wolfed down a whole loaf of fresh-baked bread that I
had carelessly left within reach on the counter, unaware that a mere
ziplock bag would not conceal the scent of food from his powerful
nose. We came home to find the remains of the ziplock bag on the
floor and a very satisfied looking Mozart roving the kitchen without a
trace of guilt. We thought he’d be sick for sure, but for once
his delicate stomach didn’t revolt.

I knew from the start that Laura and the boys were a package deal;
luckily for me, Mozart’s acceptance was immediate. He was a
friendly dog, always enthusiastically welcoming new people with a spasm
of sniffing and kisses and letting them pet him or scratch his
head. If you gave him treats or scratched his back, he’d be your
friend for life. During one typically exuberant visit to the vet,
the technician told Mozart “It must be exciting
to be you.” He was his mother’s precious heathen, a mischievous
angel, and that’s how we’ll remember him - wolfing down his food,
tussling with his brother in fits of mock savagery, randomly dropping
to the ground during a walk to roll ecstatically in the grass.
And, best of all, hopping up on the bed on Saturday mornings to wake us
up with little butterfly kisses.